Priya Chandrasekaran

Priya Chandrasekaran is an assistant professor of Liberal Arts and Anthropology at Juilliard. She was born in Brooklyn, NY. She earned a BA as an independent major from Cornell, an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and a PhD in Anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she was a dissertation fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the Committee on Globalization and Social Change.

Before joining Juilliard, Chandrasekaran taught at Hamilton College, Princeton University, Pratt Institute and Hunter College, as well as for the Bard Prison Initiative. She has extensive professional experience as a college writing tutor, outdoor educator, and leader of student groups throughout the Global South. She also served as traveling faculty for the International Honors Program (IHP) in Climate Change.

Chandrasekaran thinks and writes about social/environmental justice, globalization, eco-feminism, the food system and storytelling, particularly as these relate to colonial histories and decolonial futures. She has been awarded research grants from the American Association of University Women and the National Science Foundation. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Artist’s Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Rural Studies, Fieldsights, The Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Yearbook of Women’s History, Silk Road Review, J Journal: New Writings on Justice, among other places. In addition to ethnographic and scholarly pursuits, she continues to write fiction that explores empathy and political solidarity.